Dark Echo

prototype build for the Games For Blind Gamers 5 game jam, February 2026

Dark Echo is an echolocation-based maze crawl game, designed to be played with no graphics, only audio. The inspiration for this game came to me many years ago as a result of a real-life experience of echolocation: Standing outside my high school and clapping, I could clearly hear the shape of the building.

I've wanted to make a game based on this concept ever since. When I heard about the Games For Blind Gamers jam, I realized I finally had the skills and the opportunity to make it happen.

You'll need a pair of stereo speakers with a good angle of separation to get the spatial audio to work — making it work with headphones requires a whole different kind of math that I don't know how to implement.

The program is provided as C source code and must be built from source. The build has been tested on Mac OS and should also work on Linux. I've also just uploaded an experimental Windows build.